Tanner Jeremy & Gardner Andrew (eds.) Materialising the Roman Empire

UCL Press, 2024. — 354 p.Materialising the Roman Empire edited by Jeremy Tanner and Andrew Gardner is a fresh approach to Roman archaeology that elucidates the impact of material culture in shaping imperial life, from technological innovations to social structures. This book defines an innovative research agenda for Roman archaeology, highlighting the diverse ways in which the Empire was made materially tangible in the lives of its inhabitants. The volume explores how material culture was integral to the process of imperialism, both as the Empire grew, and as it fragmented, and in doing so it provides up-to-date overviews of major topics in Roman archaeology.Each chapter offers a thorough overview of a major field within the archaeology of the Roman Empire. The book’s authors explore the distinctive contribution that archaeology and the study of material culture can make to our understanding of the key institutions and fields of activity in the Roman Empire. The opening chapters address major technologies that, at first glance, appear to be mechanisms of integration across the Roman Empire: roads, writing, and coinage. The focus then shifts to the analysis of key social structures oriented around material forms and activities found all over the Roman world, such as trade, urbanism, slavery, craft production, and frontiers. Finally, the book extends to more abstract dimensions of the Roman world: art, empire, religion, and ideology, in which the significant themes remain the dynamics of power and influence. The whole builds towards a broad exploration of the nature of imperial power and the interconnections that stimulated new community identities and created new social divisions.Roman archaeology is, depending on your perspective, in a period of comfortable continuity, or profound crisis. Like archaeology more generally, there is currently a lack of either a unifying paradigm or its obvious alternative, a deep ideological rift between competing schools of thought. Rather, there appears to be a state of benign fragmentation which allows multiple perspectives to prosper and seems able to smooth over the rhetorical – at least – differences between them to let archaeologists just get along, and get on with their work. This might be perfectly acceptable, but in the world in which archaeology is practised, there are real crises. For the discipline to remain vital, intellectually and pragmatically, and not simply resort to what it has been before – a nostalgic retreat from the present-day world – recognition that this comfort might conceal our own crisis is needed. For our discipline, whether at the level of archaeology itself, or the Roman sub-field, to attract new intakes of students, be enhanced with new jobs or take part in current debates, its critical relevance to the twenty-first century challenges of pandemic disease, imperialism, nationalism and climate change needs to be argued and articulated within and beyond the academy. Roman archaeology specifically has much to contribute to significant aspects of understanding these problems, but to do so will require unsettling some of the comfortable habits we have become used to in the last generation or so.ContentsList of figures
List of tables
Abbreviations
List of contributorsPreface
Jeremy TannerIntroduction: Roman archaeology and the materiality of empire
Andrew GardnerRoads and communications
Ray LaurenceAn empire of words? Archaeology and writing in the Roman world
John PearceArchaeologies of coinage
Chris HowgegoTrade in the Roman Empire
Andrew WilsonEmpire and urbanism in ancient Rome
Louise Revell‘Becoming darkness’ and the invisible slave economy: archaeological approaches to the study of enslavement in the Roman world
Rebecca RedfernThe Roman Empire and transformations in craft production
Astrid Van Oyen
Art and empire in the ancient Roman world
Peter StewartMaterialising imperial ideology and religion in the Roman world
Ton DerksEmpires and their boundaries: the archaeology of Roman frontiers
Andrew GardnerImperial power and its limits: social and cultural integration and resistance in the Roman Empire
David J. MattinglyIndex